need advice: legally enforcing a ban

[TerryP]

On a site I help tend to, we have a disgruntled former member who is no longer welcome on our website or game servers along with a few of his friends.

Recruiting on another groups server and abusing the server will tend to get that done to ya even if you are an ex member.


When a thread came up about it in our public forum and some mentioning of bans were put forth by less technical-minded patrons. He created another account to post about it in a new thread, as rebelution. My associate and I humored him just long enough to slap the necessary bans on his areas IP ranges ;-)


We have a few more hits and proxies which we've also made efforts to lock out via our referrer blocking, obviously it's a case of time wasting for all parties (he wants to waste our time and bandwidth).

Much more of this and I think his account will be tied to a Perl script to automatically ban his current IP, delete his site session from the database, and send him a warning message, which would probably annoy him into something more legally entangling.


We didn't bother to delete his accounts because he'll just brush fire into more. The only consistent thing has been his registering with username@yahoo.com -> easy enough to lock out of our system but, then again he'll just find another. At least this way, we know how to track the kid across our site easy enough while looking for other accounts. If any of our members still have a copy of his application form from, we can probably get his real name on file.


Between the web servers access logs and the # of IP/referrer blocks we've processed, since he will not stay off our 'virtual' property, is there any legal action that can be brought against him?


For me, it's mostly the same as trespassing or breaking & entering but i may as well live on the web.


The offender resides in California, USA and our server is on the USA's east coast.